When creating complex and long document, the drafter may need to check the structure of the document in an independent way from its contents. It is also helpful to have the ability to hide part of the document when complete in order to focus on portions still in progress. Such feature provides users with the ability to focus on part of the document and speed up any search and find task. This also gives the user the ability to better analyze the writing/content by checking it through different views.
The existing expand/collapse feature allows a user to hide part of the text in a way that the user can see and concentrate only on the part of immediate interest. This feature is available on many tools rendering text such as the operating system tools to show the tree of directories, integrated development environment tools, and email writing pads.
However, with all these tools, this feature is limited in the way it is applied: First, the feature is applied to very specific text with some semantic meaning. The text allowed to be collapsed is recognized for its purpose, e.g. as representation of directories or a piece of code within specific tags in some specific language; or in the other way it must be selected by the user and marked from the beginning to the end.
Second, either any collapse specification (e.g., start point, end point, and resuming words) is specific to the tool used and the user cannot have its own choices, or in case of marked selections, the choices must be defined any time is used for any different text. In other words, this feature is strictly bound with both the tool used and with the text processed.